Last week we had the MySQL Meetup with MariaDB Developers in Amsterdam, which went on easily for about 3.5 hours. Thanks to all for listening (these were lightning talks, not with a strict 5 minute clock with Q&A thrown in), and Daniël van Eeden for organising this at the eBay offices (whom kindly provided pizza, beer and soft drinks as well). We had many talks, and I’ve managed to put up most of the slides into a Google Drive folder, so feel free to access the …

People at Intel started the pmem library project some time ago, it’s open to the broader community at GitHub and  other developers, including Linux kernel devs, are actively involved.

While the library does allow interaction with an SSD using a good-old-filesystem, we know that addressing SSD through SATA or SAS is very inefficient. That said, the type of storage architecture that SSD uses does require significant management for write levelling and verifying so that the device as a whole actually lasts, and your data is kept safe: in theory you could write to an NVRAM chip, and not know when it didn’t actually store your data properly.

But there are other technologies, such as Memristor (RRAM) and Phase Change Memory …

A common way to implement point in time recovery capability is:

to regularly do a full backup of a database, and to save the binary logs of that database (or from its master if doing backups on a slave).

When point in time recovery is required you need to:

restore a backup, and apply the binary logs up to the point of recovery.

(Step # 2 and # b above are the ones that will be simplified

Update 2016-01-30: restarting the IO_THREAD might be considered useful in some situations (avoiding MDEV-9138).  Look for "in contrast, if the IO thread was also stopped first" in MDEV-6589 for more information.

In a previous post, I listed some sequences of commands that you should not run on a MariaDB slave that is lagging and which is using the GTID protocol.  Those are the following (do not

In the spirit of sharing war stories and avoiding others to do the same mistakes as I did, here are some sequences of commands that you should avoid to run on a MariaDB slave that is lagging and which is using the GTID protocol.  Remember, do not run those because...

So, those bad commands are the following:

"STOP SLAVE; START SLAVE UNTIL ...;", or "STOP SLAVE; START SLAVE;" (to remove an

Next week, all the MariaDB Server developers will descend to Amsterdam for the developer’s meeting. As you know the meeting is open to all interested parties, so we hope to see you in Amsterdam Tuesday Oct 13 – Thursday Oct 15. The schedule is now online as well.

In addition to that, Monday Oct 12 2015, there is also a meetup planned with the MySQL User Group NL. As the organiser Daniël van Eeden wrote, this is a one of a kind meetup: “This is a very unique event, it is not often possible to find so many MariaDB developers together and speaking about what they work on.”

Yes, we’re doing it lightning talk …

We remember when we first started auditing MySQL servers, there were very few tools available.  In one of our early big gigs, we were battling serious performance issues for a client.  At the time, tuning-primer.sh was about the only tool available that could be used to diagnose performance bottlenecks.  Fortunately, with a lot of manual interpolation of the raw data it presented, we were able to find the issue with the server and suggest how to resolve them.  For that we are very thankful.  It was a first step in analyzing MySQL status variables, minimizing the number of formulas to learn and calculate by hand.  Obviously doing it by hand takes forever!

Now fast-forward to today.  Unfortunately, not much has changed.  Many DBAs and developers are still using open source tools such as tuning-primer, mysqltuner.pl, mysqlreport, and so on.  Don’t get the wrong; those tools have …

I have released MySQL-Sandbox 3.1.01, which is the first release after the move to GitHub. While the changes are not so spectacular (it's a minor release, with mostly bug fixes), I am pleased to see that the move has started producing collaboration. Two of the changes were provided by Daniël van Eeden and Mark Leith, who have scratched some of their own itches by providing useful patches.

All in all, this period of working with GitHub has been liberating. Although Bazaar plays with the same principles of git, it lacks most of the tools and the know-how which characterizes git. Add to this that also my team has moved Tungsten Replicator …

Percona Live Europe is now more than a week away. l left Amsterdam with a positive thought: it has been the best European event for MySQL so far. Maybe the reason is that I saw the attendance increasing, or maybe it was the quality of the talks, or because I heard others making the same comment, and I also saw a reinvigorated MySQL ecosystem.
There are three main aspects I want to highlight.

1. MySQL 5.7 and the strong presence of the Oracle/MySQL team
There have been good talks and keynotes on MySQL 5.7. It is a sign of the strong commitment of Oracle towards MySQL. I think there is an even more important point. The most interesting features in 5.7 and the projects still in MySQL Labs derive or are in some way inspired by features available from other vendors. Some examples:

• The JSON datatype from …

I installed the MariaDB 10.1 Release Candidate. Nothing interesting happened, which from MariaDB's point of view is good. But here's how I tried to make it interesting. Some of this applies to late releases of MariaDB 10.0 as well.

Loop with MAKE INSTALL

My habit is to download the source to directory X and then say "cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/X" (the same directory), then "make", then "make install". That doesn't work any more. Now I can't install in the same directory that I downloaded in. Not a big deal; perhaps I'm the only person who had this habit.

Crash with ALTER

In an earlier blog post General Purpose Storage Engines in MariaDB I mentioned a crash, which I'm happy to say is fixed now. Here's another way to crash, once again involving different storage engines.

Welcome to the …